Halliburton Co. said on Tuesday a federal judge has denied class-action status to the lead plaintiff in a six-year-old case about securities law violations.

With the Sept. 29 decision, lead plaintiff Archdiocese of Milwaukee Supporting Fund will have to pursue on its own the lawsuit, which claims Halliburton defrauded investors through questionable accounting practices from 1998 to 2001.

A new high-tech aerial photography system that can spot an illegal porch from 5,000 feet is being marketed to tax assessors as a way to grow revenue.

Pictometry International Corp. says it offers tax assessors 12 different views of every square foot of building or land in a jurisdiction that buys their system. They call it "sophisticated visual intelligence."

State Sen. Jeff Van Drew has another name for it.

"It's Big Brother," said Van Drew, D-Cape May, Cumberland, Atlantic.

"We're not supposed to be spying on people. When it gets to the point where we're doing aerial spying on people's lives, I've had enough," Van Drew said.

A new OpEdNews article details information about the pending subpeona of Mike Connell in connection with a transfer of the Ohio election results server to a partisan server in 2004. Black Box Voting has learned that similar results middlemen are already set up in 2008 for Illinois, Colorado and Kentucky. At this point citizens need to get on a search and expose mission for every state to learn the routing of election results production and publication.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey appointed a special prosecutor on Monday to investigate whether criminal charges should be brought against former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and other officials in connection with the firings of nine of United States attorneys in 2006.

The move came as the Justice Department released a report by its inspector general severely criticizing the process that led to the firings.

Colorado Democrats accused a Republican county clerk Wednesday of falsely informing Colorado College that students from outside the state could not register to vote if their parents claimed them as a dependent on their tax returns.

At a news conference in Colorado Springs, Democrats also criticized Robert Balink, the El Paso County clerk and recorder, who was a delegate to the Republican National Convention, for taking other steps they said would dampen voting by college students, who are expected to heavily favor Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

: “There are about 30 scams the republicans are deliberately using, particularly in the swing states to get democratic voters off the rolls. These scams originate in the so-called Help America Vote Act which was passed after the Florida debacle in the year 2000. It was originally suggested by democrats and republicans but it was passed by a republican congress with a republican senate and a republican president. And instead of reforming what happened in Florida it basically institutionalized all the problems that happened in Florida. And institutionalized a series of impediments that make it very difficult for democrats to register, for democrats to vote and then for democrats to have their vote counted.

“And if democrats won’t talk about this how the hell’s anybody gonna know about it? I’m involved with this kind of thing every day--I didn’t know that until you just told me. The media is not talking about it. How in the hell is somebody gonna find this out? It’s just incredible.